Death of a Watermelon Seller

On one of the hotter days of the year, a fifty-six-year-old Chinese farmer named Deng Jiazheng rode a tricycle, with his wife, from their village to the nearby city of Chenzhou, in the south-central province of Hunan. The couple had come to hawk a cartload of homegrown watermelons, and they set up their stall along a scenic stretch near a river, where visitors were plentiful and competition scarce. Not long after they arrived, a group of the urban-management force known as the chengguan approached to shoo them from the spot, where such unlicensed peddling was apparently banned. For the offense, Deng was fined a hundred yuan—about sixteen dollars—surely the equivalent of a day’s work for the couple. To compound the indignity, a member of the chengguan helped himself to four watermelons before leaving, shoving Deng’s wife aside when she opposed the theft. A little while later, just as the couple was setting up shop in another location, yet another squad of chengguan surrounded the stall. A physical altercation ensued, and quickly escalated. Then, in the words of local authorities, Deng, suddenly and without provocation, “dropped dead.”

The plausibility of the claim depends, in large part, on one’s opinion of the chengguan, a term that has become inextricably linked to brutality and even deaths. The word is a shortened version of City Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement Bureau, and literally translates as “city manager”; the chengguan themselves—there’s no real American equivalent—occupy a nebulous space between bureaucrats, security guards, and police, and are primarily responsible, in theory, for enforcement of quality-of-life issues. From the system’s inception, in 1997, as a small neighborhood experiment in administrative enforcement, it has grown to encompass branches in more than three hundred cities, staffed by seven thousand personnel. While they lack the power to arrest, much less assault—they do so frequently, regardless—the parameters of their jurisdiction have never been entirely clear.

Deng died last Wednesday, and his wife was hospitalized; that afternoon, hundreds of onlookers joined his relatives in protest against the chengguan’s alleged violence. An attempt by local authorities to remove Deng’s body from the site of his death—some feared it would be disposed of without a proper autopsy—fed the fury. As word of the incident spread, reporters descended, as did the riot police. Cars and mobile phones were smashed. Death threats were made. Ten more people were injured.

“My name is Deng Yanling and I am the daughter of the watermelon farmer,” read a post that went online the day after Deng’s death. “Everyone associated with my father’s incident, in real life or on Weibo”—China’s version of Twitter—“have been asked to stop discussing the case. Yesterday, my father’s body was found with blood clots and there was bleeding under his scalp but the government wants to cover up the truth and claim that my father was suddenly struck by an heart attack. These actions by the government are completely unacceptable to us!!!!”

Neither were they acceptable, it seemed, to the general public, especially when, a short while later, the post was deleted and replaced with a suspiciously peacemaking entry “thanking the government for its support at this difficult time.” On Weibo, the country’s closest thing to a civil society, the hashtag “watermelon farmer death” became inescapable, as did gruesome photos of bloodied protesters. “When the officers ganged up to attack the watermelon vendor, perhaps it never occurred to them they were dealing with someone’s life,” the influential blogger Li Chengpeng wrote in a widely circulated essay. “[I]n their eyes, human lives are not too different from watermelons.”

Comparisons of Deng to the twenty-six-year-old Tunisian produce hawker Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation sparked the Arab Spring, have, of course, been inevitable. “Can the death of a Chinese watermelon seller trigger the same tidal change that the death of a vegetable vendor in Tunisia did across the Middle East?” the South China Morning Postasked. Despite the uncanny similarities, the short answer is no, and the explanation for that has as much to do with what the central government has not done as what it has.

In the early aughts, the government implemented the system of chengguan enforcement throughout the country, with the aim of rooting out bureaucratic redundancies. It would also help cities accommodate China’s ongoing urban migration, for which the existing social structure was woefully underequipped, by doing things like cracking down on unlicensed venders and detaining people without residential permits. The goals were good, the ground-level execution haphazard. Beijing gave the local authorities little sense of how such a complex operation should be run and regulated. According to a seventy-six-page report on abuses committed by the chengguan entitled “Beat Him, Take Everything Away,” compiled by Human Rights Watch last year, there existed, from the beginning, “no overarching national regulatory framework laying out the permissible scope of chengguan duties, no uniform training requirements or code of conduct, and no systematic monitoring and investigations.”

And despite the hand-wringing that occurs at the upper echelons of the Communist Party over incidents like Deng’s death—not because someone died, of course, but because such things come perilously close to threatening the Party’s legitimacy—there has been little effort made at substantive reform.

In the absence of such change, individual chengguan make for convenient scapegoats. These city para-police become the face of violence and misconduct while the authoritarian regime that dispenses them like pawns continues to rule with impunity. In the case of Deng, state-affiliated newspapers swiftly seized upon the deviant “personal qualities” of “a minority of chengguan” officials as the true culprits. “Noticeably, it has nothing to do with the chengguan system,” the Global Times, a tabloid produced by the party-run People’s Daily, opined. To admit the chengguan’s failure would mean criticizing a system that reflects China’s exponential growth, as well as the hopes of the millions of people who want to cross the divide from ramshackle rural life to urban refinement.

Deng Jiazheng, who woke up at 3 A.M. to pick watermelons from the fields in front of his house, would have known these hopes well. His eldest daughter was working in a city, another was attending university, and his youngest son was in the most government-buttressed organization of all, the Army. If he sold enough watermelons, the old man must have thought, his back bent in the gauzy pre-dawn darkness, no child of his would ever be treated like one.

Recommended Stories

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.